This is an essay to open a discussion of medieval Latin charms as a genre rooted in oral tradition. It will concern itself solely with materials drawn from manuscripts made in England from about A.D. 1000 to near 1500. One reason for setting such limitations on the materials is that restricting the study chronologically and geographically will facilitate identification of features peculiar to the insular English tradition of Latin 1 For though Latin charms can be found throughout medieval charms.Europe, to make cross-cultural comparisons prematurely might obscure distinctive regional features. To begin, it seems best to state what is meant by the word “charm” in this paper. Carmen is the word that in classical Latin meant, among other things, “a solemn ritual utterance, usually sung or chanted in a metrical form” (OLD). The word denoted, on the one hand, a religious hymn, or on the other, a magical chant, spell, or incantation. Related words in late Latin are 2incantamentum and incantatio. These words carry associations with magic due to the implications of chanting or incanting in pagan contexts. In the medieval manuscripts under consideration here, carmen is the word repeatedly used as a tag, a heading, or a marginal gloss to call attention to some kind of verbal cure. Its meaning is not confined solely to spoken remedies, since the directions often indicate that the efficacious words are to be written, nor is the term attached especially to poetic texts. The word

1 A methodology for the study and comparison of oral literature that takes into account “tradition-dependence” as well as “genre-dependence” is described by Foley (1990:ch. 1).

2 DuCange gives “Incantamentum ad leniendum dolorem adhibere, apud Ammian. lib. 16 ubi Lindenbrogius”; for incantatio: “Fredegar. Epist. cap. 9, Mummolum factione Fredegundae, cui reputabant filium suum per incantationem interfecisse, iussit Rex suggillare.” LATIN CHARMS AND ORAL TRADITION 117 carmen, as well as Middle English “charme,” indicates that a remedy works 3by means of words, rather than, for example, the application of plants. In the early, Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, vernacular words also designate verbal cures: galdor and its verb ongalan come from the Indo-European root ghel–, which has two lines of semantic development, one of which gives rise to the English words yell and yelp, while the other is associated with enchanting and singing. The latter meaning survives in the word nightingale. Old English gebede, meaning “prayer,” also appears with reference to healing formulas. In Anglo-Saxon vernacular charms one finds the directions “sing this gealdor” and “sing this gebede” accompanying the same kinds of formulas. By and large, the most salient feature of the short Latin texts that are denominated charms in this paper is their Christian character. In what follows I shall address four elementary questions: (1) What are the near-allied genres? In other words, in what contexts do charms appear in the manuscripts? (2) In what sense can the genre be described as oral traditional? (3) What are the forms of language in which the genre coheres? (4) How, on what occasion, by whom, and for whom are charms performed, and how do they function within these situations?

Manuscript Contexts and Allied Genres

Charms, or verbal remedies, are closely allied with medical recipes (Anglo-Saxon læcedomes) and remedial rituals on one side and with prayers, blessings, and in some linguistic features with exorcism on the other, verbal, side. One important manuscript context for charms, both during the Anglo-Saxon period and afterwards, is the category of manuscripts containing collections of treatments compiled for practicing healers, physicians, or leeches. Charms, intermingled with non-verbal prescrip-tions for various ailments, occur in these books both in the vernaculars (Old English, Middle

3 When such verbal formulas are, however, employed in combination with herbal remedies or become associated with amulets and talismans, they appear in no way different from those unassociated with objects. It is the formulas, spoken and written, intelligible and unintelligible, that are the focus of attention here.

118 LEA OLSAN 4English, Anglo-Norman French) and in Latin. The common purpose of such books is to satisfy the need for a sort of handbook of treatments for symptoms and maladies. Charms fall in among the various modes of curing. For example, in one cure for “the devil’s temptations” from the Anglo-5Saxon Leechbooks, we can see traces of three curative genres combined—an herb-cure, a ritual employing holy water, and curative words, or a charm, in Latin. Most of the remedy is in the vernacular:

[A drink against the devil’s temptations. Tuftythorn, cropleek, lupin, ontre, bishopwort, fennel, cassuck, betony. Bless these herbs, put [them] in ale [and] holy water, and let the drink be within the room where the sick man is. And repeatedly before he drinks, sing three times over the drink, “God, in your name make me well.”]

Although the Latin part of this remedy is very simple and slight, its power is implied by its incantatory function and by the directions that the drink (and the words) “be within the room where the sick man is.” The shift in grammatical person from the prescriptive sing to saluum me fac, in which the speaker who is not the patient speaks for him, acts within the circumstances to coalesce the intent of the care-taker/healer and the patient. The source of power in the formula itself (Deus in nomine tuo salvum me fac) resides in its implicative weight. Textually, the formula derives from the first line of Vulgate Psalm 53; however, in this oral performance the single line evokes the entire psalm. John Foley’s concept of “traditional referentiality” seems operative here, for the one line evokes “a context that is enormously larger and more echoic than the text or work itself” (1991:7).

4 Examples can be found in Grattan and Singer 1952 (Old English and Latin), Ogden 1938 (Middle English and Latin), and B. L. MS Royal 12.D.XXV (Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin).

5 In this paper the term Leechbooks refers to the entire contents of British Library MS. Royal 12.D.XVII, which is written in the hand of one scribe. It consists of three parts: the first two are commonly identified as Bald’s Leechbook on the basis of the colophon at the top of folio 109r; the third scholars have designated a separate collection of recipes. See Wright 1955:13 and Cameron 1983:153. LATIN CHARMS AND ORAL TRADITION 119 The line from Psalm 53 either functions as a cue for recitation of the whole psalm, or it adverts to the known, but here unspoken, contents of the psalm. If the reciter here were a monk or priest, the psalm would have been a 6deeply ingrained habit of thought no longer tied to its textual source. Words play only a supporting role to the medicinal herbs, which have been blessed and administered with ale and holy water in the Leechbook charm. A different overlapping of genres occurs in B. L. Royal 12.B.XXV, 7fol. 61r. In this fourteenth-century collection of remedial and utilitarian works, a remedy for toothache embodies prayer, which is termed a charm and directed to be tied to the head of the patient. The charm exemplifies the 8wide overlap between Christian charms and prayers:

[In the city Alexandria rests the body of Blessed Apollonia, virgin and martyr, whose teeth the wicked extracted. Through the intercession of Blessed Maria, virgin, and of all saints and blesse virgin and martyr, free, Lord, the teeth of your servant from toothache. Saint Blaise, pray for me. In the name of the Father, etc. Our Father. Ave Maria. And let this charm be tied upon the head of the patient.]

A similar combination of adjuration and intercessory prayers occurs in the medical collection known as the Liber de Diversis Medicinis, edited

6 See Dyer 1989 (535-36) on the universality of the psalms: “Every monk was expected to memorize all 150 psalms”; furthermore, “years of daily encounters with the prayers of the psalmist fostered a rich contextuality of associations, a private and interior exegesis of scriptural text in an ever-widening field of significance.” These facts and the medieval tituli psalmorum, which designated some lines in the psalms as the vox Christi (538), deserve further consideration as partial explanation for why and how psalms came to be used in formulas for verbal healing.

7 For a description of this manuscript and an account of the Latin charms, see Olsan 1989b.

8 For a discussion of the theoretical problem of distinguishing prayers and charms as two genres of discourse and a proposed solution based on the structure of the invocation of the mediator in each, see Todorov 1978:255-56. 120 LEA OLSAN by Margaret Ogden (1938:18), where a marginal note reads, “a charme for the teethe.” Instances such as these indicate that in the fourteenth century prayers were used as amulets—as above where the prayer is tied to the patient’s head—and that charms, arising in the contemporary Christian culture and composed of Christian elements (fragments of liturgy, saints’ legends, prayers) were accepted as effective remedial prescriptions (cp. Thomas 1971:42 and Olsan 1989b). One explanation for the lack of practical differentiation between charms and prayers sees them both as forms of ritualism. Mary Douglas has remarked on the difficulty (even for a thoughtful theologian) of making a “tidy distinction between sacramental and magical efficacy,” since both are “concerned with the correct manipulation of efficacious signs” (1982:9-10). Furthermore, it is but a short step from the evocation of powerful symbols in formal ritual contexts to the evocation of the same symbols, phraseology, and beliefs in essentially magical ways in the humbler circumstances of life when a person feels in distress or need. In Latin Christian charms used by medieval people in England (and elsewhere), the efficacy of the remedies lies, in part, in the patient’s response to the powers associated with symbols evoked from the Christian tradition. Nevertheless, understanding that medieval charms generally appropriate Christian symbols and beliefs leaves the question in too broad a frame to tell us much about how they work and how they might be best understood as a healing genre. A more productive strategy is to ask whether we can speak of medieval Latin charms as constituting a traditional oral genre of some sort and thereby attain some insights not available under the aegis of previous categories, such as “popular religion” or “superstitious medicine.”

Orality

The evidence for defining charms as an oral genre presents a varied landscape in which we can locate objects of different kinds. Every judgment concerning what species of thing we have in a particular charm—whether it be oral, oral-derived, or whether it be conceived as or 9copied from a written text —must carefully take into account the character

9 On the principle of “text-dependence,” see Foley 1990:11 ff. LATIN CHARMS AND ORAL TRADITION 121 10of its textualization. In some cases, a charm is written carelessly in a margin of a text or the text bears signs of its having been recorded directly from aural memory. The following charm for childbirth was added at the bottom of an unfilled leaf (fol. 129v) in B. L. Sloane 3160 by someone not fully literate in Latin. In the representation below, parentheses have been put where brackets appear in the manuscript text to designate units of speech. In the manuscript, the narrative section of the charm through Christus regnat is underlined and the whole charm roughly boxed in. Capitals used below to distinguish the words containing power are mine.

[In the name of the Father LAZARUS and of the Son COME FORTH and of the Holy Spirit CHRIST CALLS YOU + CHRIST + SHOUTS + JESUS PREACHES + CHRIST RULES + EREX + AREX + RYMEX + CHRISTI ELEYZON + EEEEEEEEE +.]

Errors in the Latin (“speritus scantus” and “stonat”) suggest how little experience the recorder of the charm has had writing Latin. The spoken form of the charm is suggested by the alternation between the framing In nomine formula and the words borrowed from the Gospel of John (11:43). Each part of the In nomine formula prepares for the following words of power: “Lazarus,” “ueni foras,” then “Christus te uocat” with its appositional elaborations “Christus tonat” and “Iesus predicat.” In terms of speech-act theory (Austin 1975:99-102), the power of these gospel-based formulas is constituted in their illocutionary force, which will bring about the delivery of a child. Then a different kind of compositional unit follows. The nonsense string “EREX + AREX + RYMEX +” is probably generated on the sounds of the morpheme rex (king), which derives semantically from the last formula in the preceding unit (“Christus regnat”).

10 For a careful study of the implications of manuscript texts for understanding how a vernacular poem was received, see Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe’s study (1987) of the manuscript contexts of “Cædmon’s Hymn.” She concludes that “the differing level of and nature of linguistic cues in Latin and Old English imply that Cædmon’s Hymn was read with different expectations, conventions, and techniques than those for the Latin verses with which it traveled” (20). The manuscript evidence of Latin charms suggests that Latin texts, as well as vernacular texts, display various degrees of orality. 122 LEA OLSAN Another mark of orality in the Lazarus charm, that is, apart from its utilization of sound patterns and its direct recourse to the power of Christ’s 11spoken words, is its evocation of an untextualized communal tradition in which the resurrection/rebirth of Lazarus is symbolically identified with the birth of a child. In the charm, the identity is entirely implicative. However, other instances of the same motif reinforce the sense of its traditional 12character. Charms tend to be relatively short pieces, yet frequently we find directions for performance inscribed with the text. Where the verb dic or dices occurs, the words are meant to be spoken, that is, the written charm is a kind of script for oral performance. Its textualization is somehow incidental. This situation raises the prospect that in medieval charms we can directly observe the textualization of an oral tradition. There is some truth to this statement. That is to say, some charms like the Lazarus charm above seem to have been recorded from aural memory, and others, although neatly textualized, are clearly meant to be performed orally. In addition, 13 incantatory speech, challenges to disease-causing agents, and narrative and 14 15dialogue forms —all of which are marks of orality —perdure. Yet a detailed mapping of the orality of charms presents a more complicated picture than these facts at first suggest. One complicating factor is that writing, including written performance, appears as an integral part of the tradition of insular Latin 16charms even in the earliest records, just as it did in ancient magic. For

11 See Ong for a still useful description of the distinctive perceptual and cognitive impact of spoken words (1967:ch. 3), especially in Christian tradition (179-188).

12 For example, B. L. Sloane 2584, fol. 25v.

13 Verbal challenges to disease-causing agents correspond to the “agonistic dynamics of oral thought processes” as described in Ong 1982:43-45.

14 Stories are a fundamental way of organizing knowledge in oral societies and a mode for bringing the past into the present. See, e.g., Ong 1982:140-41.

15 See Ong 1982:38-39 and espec. 43-46.

16 Goody (1968:16) notes the antiquity of the use of writing in magical texts, which he identifies as a separate category from “Books of God that form the core of world religions.” He observes: “This tradition of magical texts goes back to the beginnings of

LATIN CHARMS AND ORAL TRADITION 123 some charms in medieval manuscripts consist solely of graphic symbols or letters, which were never meant to be spoken. In addition, directions to write formulas down and carry them on the person occur in the oldest insular 17manuscripts. Furthermore, charms written on objects (leaves, communion hosts, virgin parchment, knife handles, sticks, and the like) have an extended 18 symbolic significance. Such uses of writing in connection with charms do not signify that charms should be understood as if generated primarily as written texts. Rather, writing as a technology was very early adapted to the rituals and tradition of curative magic. The point needs clarification. In medieval society, even in early Anglo-Saxon society, we are already confronted with a mixed culture in which we find both oral and literate registers. Functionally, however, charms remain closely tied to social contexts in which traditional attitudes, values, and habits of thought predominated in the contexts of human (and animal) illness, childbirth, and protection of property. Furthermore, charms, in fact, live only in performance. Whether the performance is written or oral, it is conceived as an efficacious action and often operates in combination with physical rituals involving face-to-face human interactions 19characteristic of oral societies. But this picture changes. The interface between written and spoken, literate and oral modes in verbal healing adjusts with cultural shifts in the dominant media. In the later centuries of the period under consideration, that is, by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Latin charms are not only being written in a more regular clerkly Latin, but some charms appropriate highly literate textual interpretations, for example, 20the use of Biblical types.

writing itself, stemming as it does from the Mesopotamian world where writing itself developed.”

17 For example, ligatures, Himmelsbriefe, and breves. On the authority of the breve that “speaks to its hearers,” see Clanchy 1973:204-5.

18 On the interpretation of writing as symbolic object, see Clanchy 1973:205-8.

19 Cf. Goody and Watt 1962-63:307, Goody 1977:ch. 3, and Ong 1982.

20 Brian Stock (1983:527) has said of the new categories of thought developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries: “The effects were not only felt in intellectual domain, where one saw a proliferation of exegesis, historical writing, philosophy, and theology. As noted, the new structures also fed into and were in turn nourished by the world of lived 124 LEA OLSAN In the next two parts of this paper, the problem of defining the genre will be broached through analysis of structural components and performance contexts. Through these approaches other examples will emerge to clarify the nature and degrees of orality in the charms.

Linguistic Analysis

Latin charms display a variety of linguistic forms ranging from structural components, or “compositional units” (Halpern and Foley 1978:909) built on patterns of nonsensical sounds to Latin verse, strings of powerful names, narrative themes (including dialogues), and select syntactic patterns—such as performatives of adjuration and conjuration and prescriptives. Frequently, two or three such separable units are combined within one charm, although I have not found a single charm that contains them all. Sound patterns alone serve as the effective source of power in some charms. In some instances, what have become nonsense syllables show traces of previous semantic structure or borrowing from languages exotic to the latest users. Two charms associated with snakes, one apparently for snakebite, the other for catching snakes, will illustrate:

[PORRO PORRO I DRINK ZELO ZELO ZEBETA ARRA ARRAY PARACLETE And place the aforementioned water in the mouth of the patient whether it be a man or whether it be an animal.]

2. Ad capiendum serpentes. In nomine patris etc.

experience. It was not only the educated, who were in direct contact with classical or Christian tradition, who began to adopt textual models for behavior.” This explanation fits what we observe going on in the charms: when people learned in exegesis and theology employed charms, as they did, they infused those charms with elements deriving directly from exegesis and textual study. LATIN CHARMS AND ORAL TRADITION 125 ARAPS IASPER SCRIP PORRO PONTEM ZORO ZEHEBETE ZARAF MARAS SPIRITUS P[A]RACLITUS hic bubulla bimenna que iaces super petrum et herbas. Audi et intellige quia data est michi potestas super te per deum omnipotentem et per Adam et per Euam et illam malediccionem in qua recepisti. Sta et noli suspirare quia basili[s]cus es.

[For catching snakes. In the name of the Father, etc. ARAPS JASPER WRITE? PORRO BRIDGE ZORO ZEHEBETE ZARAF MARASSPIRIT PARACLETE Here two-fold? creature, you who lie upon the rock and grass. Listen and know that power was given to me over you through God Omnipotent and through Adam and through Eve and the curse in which you were caught. Stay and do not breathe because you are a basilisk.]

Looking for a moment only at the nonsense phrases in these two charms, which follow each other on a leaf devoted to cures for dogbites and 21snakebites, it appears that the nonsense strings are multiforms of one another and that alliteration and syllabic echoes maintain the strings:

In the first charm, each three-stress string duplicates a syllabic pattern that varies at the third item. In the third element, ARRA ARRAY seems to be generated by reduplication from the first syllables of the word PARACLITUS. In the second charm, the first three words, which precede the three strings, play the voiceless stop [p] and liquid [r] and spirant [s]

21 Albert Lord’s concept of “multiformity” as observed in singers’ performances of Serbo-Croatian epic (1960:119-20) provides one of the most useful strategies for understanding so-called “variants” of charms, since it does not privilege any one occurrence of a charm as “source” over any other. That is, it frees us from the constraint—the interpretive error, I would say—of choosing a single charm text as the standard, then assuming that all variations from that text were somehow corruptions of one kind or another.